Eyes Down For Epsom! – By The Champagne Kid

Racing to me is all about numbers. Sure, I love my racecourse visits as much as the next racing fan, with the beauty and speed of the horses, the racecourse atmosphere, the whole buzz of the sport, but at the end of the day, we racing aficionados are nearly all drawn to racing by the betting aspect of it. And at the end of a day, we all want a profit. But for me, an end-of-day P/L account in profit does not excite particularly, and equally a loss at the end of a day does not perturb me too much.

The most important number is the profit or loss at the end of a significant period of time. For example, a calendar year. Or, maybe the end of the Jumps season (does it actually really end these days?) if that is what you concentrate on, or likewise the close of the Flat season in November. Or maybe a shorter period of say just a month. That said, even a month is too short a time for me to delight over a profit, or mump and moan about a loss.

It is only the long-term that really matters, and that is the thinking behind the tipping of The Champagne Kid racing service. That thinking allows us to keep with the MO that has been proven over time to return profits. So, we can accept that when we are betting at average odds of around 8/1 that there will be some fairly sizeable (unwanted but unavoidable) losing runs. It is inevitable and all tipsters and bettors will experience this. You just have to accept it and keep operating the methods that have proven themselves in the long term.

That was something I had to do much earlier this year, when I had an unusually high number of bets where my horse was beaten by a nose, short head, head or neck. None of the close calls went my way. That eventually corrected itself in later weeks, but during that frustrating period I kept to the same methods and principles that had always served me well in the past.

The reason I started to think along these lines about P/L when sitting down to write this week’s article, is that Betfan has very kindly asked me to run their two-day Epsom Derby Special 2018 tipping service. That presents a very different challenge in trying to make a profit over two days, to the long-term P/L thinking discussed above. A two-day tipping service covering just 14 races calls for a different approach in order to try and deliver a profit over such a small time period. However, I believe I have the tools to do that.

I am sure that clients signing up to a festival tipping service want plenty of action, and I intend to provide that. I intend to tip in most of the 14 races, even where my normal MO in my Champagne Kid service is to tip maybe only 1, 2 or maximum 3 at any given race meeting. I have race profile datasets for all 14 Epsom Derby meeting races, and those datasets provided me last year with winners such as Solomon’s Bay 10/1 and Reputation 33/1. Obviously I cannot guarantee such high-priced winners, but I will be using a selection process designed not only to maximise the chance of profit, but also to mitigate against loss.

That means, in order to give us the best chance of profit over the two days, there may be more each-way bets than I might normally tip, and there may well be a few races with 2 or even 3 horses selected.